In this paper, we describe the soccer playing agent developed by our team UT Austin Villa to participate in the RoboCup 3D simulation soccer competition held in Atlanta, U.S.A., in July 2007. The 2007 competition saw the introduction of a humanoid robot in the 3D simulation league. We present an overview of this new version of the simulation league, followed by a description of our approaches i...

Humans use eye gaze in their daily interaction with other humans. Humanoid robots, on the other hand, have not yet taken full advantage of this form of implicit communication. We designed a passive monocular gaze tracking system implemented on the iCub humanoid robot [17]. The validation of the system proved that it is a viable low-cost, calibration-free gaze tracking solution for humanoid plat...

We seek intuitive, e cient ways to create and direct human-like behaviors for humanoid robots. Here we present a method to enable humanoid robots to acquire movements by imitation. The robot uses 3D vision to perceive the movements of a human teacher, and then estimates the teacher's body postures using a fast full-body inverse kinematics method that incorporates a kinematic model of the teache...

This paper proposes a novel shuffle turning method for a humanoid robot by controlling load distribution of each sole. Conventionally, turning motion of a humanoid robot is performed by repeating of stepping the feet. However the motion is inefficient and time consuming. In our proposed methods, the feet are slipped on the floor without stepping. To minimize variation of the turning angle due t...

Humans and humanoid robots are often modeled with different types of inverted pendulum models in order to simplify the dynamic analysis of gait, balance and fall. We have earlier introduced the Reaction Mass Pendulum (RMP), an extension of the traditional inverted pendulum models, which explicitly captures the variable rotational inertia and angular momentum of the human or humanoid. In this pa...

In this paper an online posture modification method termed Jacobi Compensation is proposed, which modifies precalculated step trajectories for a humanoid robot in certain task coordinate directions. This method can accomodate for modeling errors in trajectory precalculation in that for instance the center of mass (CoM) or certain parts of the humanoid mechanism can be shifted to increase walkin...

The development process to achieve walking motion with a recently constructed humanoid robot is discussed. The desired motion is based on the solution of an optimal control problem whose constraints depend upon the high-dimensional nonlinear multibody system dynamics of the 17 DoF humanoid and physical contact constraints with the environment. On-line control strategies are developed to track t...

To increase the interest of a child in motor training we have tried to use a humanoid social robot that acts like a coach to encourage the patient. The humanoid robot "KineTron" was assembled from commercially available Bioloid Premium robotic kit. Nine movement scenarios of robot behaviour combined with voice and music were developed. During the training session, a therapist activates one of t...

An epoch of humanoid robotics started from the astonishing reveal of Honda P2 in 1996, and the focus of interest in the field has been the motion control of humanoid robots as well as the development of the hardware in the beginning of the decade. A reliable hardware with the minimum level of the mobility can be a research platform of humanoid robotics as well as mobile robot platforms like Nom...

Most humanoid robots have highly complicated structure and design of robots that are very similar to human is extremely difficult. In this paper, modelling of a general and comprehensive algorithm for control of humanoid robots is presented using Colored Petri Nets. For keeping dynamic balance of the robot, combination of Gyroscope and Accelerometer sensors are used in algorithm. Image processi...